The Family Observation of Racial and Cultural Emotion: A Multi-Method Measure of Dyadic Racial Conversations

• In Event: Beyond the Survey: Innovative Methods for Measuring and Analyzing Ethnic Racial Socialization

Abstract

In the US American context, African American parents are tasked with helping their children learn about their own and others’ emotions in ways that maintain Afro-cultural values (Boykin & Toms, 1985), but that also prepares their children to negotiate their emotions while navigating a multicultural and racist society. Further, researchers have articulated the integration and overlap of racial socialization (the process of learning about race) and emotion socialization (the process of learning about emotion) among African American families (Dunbar et al., 2017; Lozada et al., 2022) that highlight the complex and nuanced process by which African American children learn about emotions. Observational methodologies used to capture parent-adolescent conversations have previously been employed to capture both racial socialization (see Yasui, 2015 for a review) and emotion socialization (e,g., Lozada et al., 2015) independently. Yet the independent measurement of these concepts does not necessarily capture the dynamism of these processes. For instance, racial socialization observational paradigms among African American families often do not capture the affective processes (e.g., emotion-related messages, emotion expression, emotion regulation, and emotional attunement) inherent in racial socialization conversations (see Smith-Bynum et al., 2016 for an exception). Similarly, emotion socialization observational paradigms often overlook that emotion discussions among African American families may refer to emotion display rules, beliefs, and expectations that are rooted in Afro-cultural and minoritized experiences. As such, multi-method observational paradigms that include assessment of racial and emotional content of parent-adolescent conversations can provide a more integrated conceptualization of racial and cultural emotion socialization (Lozada et al., 2022). Such observational paradigms can also help to advance racial socialization research to a greater inclusion of the processes by which racial socialization occurs.
In the current presentation, I will demonstrate the use of a new multi-method observational paradigm, The Family Observation of Racial and Cultural Emotion (F.O.R.C.E.). The F.O.R.C.E. includes dyadic discussion of a time each person experienced positive and negative emotion in relation to being African American. This discussion is video recorded and analyzed in-vivo with facial emotion recognition software to help capture the emotional valence and intensity of dyadic emotion expression and attunement during conversation. Additionally, parent and adolescent cardiac and sweat activity is monitored during the conversation to capture internal arousal and regulation. Finally, parents and adolescents review episodes of the observation that appeared to have the greatest emotional intensity and report on their own and their partner’s emotions during these episodes. These reflections serve as indicators of each dyad member’s emotional experience and relational emotion understanding. The F.O.R.C.E. can later be coded by research teams to capture racial content (e.g., content and frequency of racial socialization messages), emotion socialization behaviors (e.g., emotional validation/affirmation, suppressive responses, modeling, etc.) and the contingency between racial and emotion socialization. Future directions on the use of the F.O.R.C.E. in developmental research among African American families will be discussed.

Authors

• Fantasy T. Lozada, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Presenting Author

• Rachel J Davis, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Summer Bryant